By creating notional missing pictures for The Book of Revolutions, Adam Dant’s drawings for the Daiwa Foundation embody the dramatic appeal of the methods and language of ‘noble’ and ‘romantic’ causes, in a manner that incorporates the mundane, debilitating and unvarnished aspects of day to day existence.
This new series of drawings will be accompanied by a series of propaganda pamphlets which signal the revelation of more primal social interactions, and endeavour to redress the disproportionate levels of power held by the advertising and marketing culture of today’s society. The appeal of ‘seditious pamphlets’ to a news-hungry public has been a continuing idea in Dant’s work. The antique printing techniques used by Dant, like ’tile-block printing’ for example, were once the embodiment and often the result of, an urgent political underground message and its need for rapid dissemination. Used in the same context today, these now ridiculously time consuming technologies place such pamphlets in a realm as far removed from the realities of 21st Century urban existence as are the seductive images of today’s marketeer. Dant represents, through a disarming use of humour, how traditional ideas of social and political struggles are usurped to exhalt the presence of mayonnaise ‘cheeze- whiz’ and other disposable fripperies.
The three shortlisted artists will exhibit their work at the Daiwa Foundation, Japan House Gallery in London from the 15th June to 17th July.
Daiwa Foundation